We’ve been readying ourselves to expand our server capacity, and would-be beta testers—20,000 of them, in fact—will soon be coming to play Prismata. So in preparation for the huge influx of new players, I’ve decided to make a sequel to our original how to play video for beginners, and the supplementary text guide. They were successful in explaining the rules and user interface of Prismata, but some players, especially those unfamiliar with real-time-strategy decision-making, had no idea what to do each turn.

Should I be building Drones, or laying down a lot of Blastforges, or spamming attackers?

In this article, I hope to answer these questions with some simple rules of thumb—guidelines to help new players through the overwhelming amount of options. Of course, the true art in Prismata is discovering, through experience, when these rules should be broken.

As a veteran of online poker, with over a million dollars in profit, I’ve learned that in turn-based online games, there’s a great amount of value in concealing information and deceiving your opponent. Poker players need not look far to find lengthy articles on how to profit from timing tells and deceive opponents through timings.

Such tactics really shine in Hearthstone because there are an incredible number of interesting ways to abuse Hearthstone’s user interface to hide information, cause confusion, and lure your opponents into making sub-optimal plays. Whether or not you decide to use these tactics, I hope you’ll find them interesting.

Before we begin, a couple of disclaimers:

Disclaimer 1: These tactics will irritate your opponents. These tactics are controversial. Many of them involve completely unnecessary stalling. People will think you’re an asshole if you employ them. Using them on your friends (assuming you want to keep them) is not recommended.

Disclaimer 2: These tactics aren’t for everyday laddering. They’re not gonna help you climb fast from rank 20 to rank 10. They’re not gonna help you grind faster to earn gold and unlock heroes. These tricks are for tournament matches and legend-level ladder games that you really want to win.

Disclaimer 3: These tactics are not for everyone. These tips are for the soulless masochists among us—those willing to sacrifice our integrity to squeeze out every last advantage possible in every match. They’re not fun. They may waste your time, and may encourage your opponents to grief you. But if you crave every possible edge you can possibly get, these tips are for you!